GamesRPGMetaphor Re FantazioMetaphor: ReFantazio releases a meaty prologue demo that spans the game’s ‘first 4 dungeons’—plus, your save data will carry over to the full gameWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesRPGMetaphor Re FantazioMetaphor: ReFantazio releases a meaty prologue demo that spans the game’s ‘first 4 dungeons’—plus, your save data will carry over to the full gameWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: ATLUS / SEGA)
Metaphor: ReFantazio is shaping up to be dangerous for me, as someonewho has never played an Atlus RPG—mostly because the developer’s veer away from psychic dream-delving high schoolers and into high fantasy is exactly my kind of bag.
And now there’s a demo!Announced earlier todayand re-announced during the Tokyo Game Show, theMetaphor: ReFantazio prologue demolets you play (you guessed it) the prologue—and it’s downright meaty.
TheSteam pagepromises the “first four” dungeons, seven out of the game’s 40 Archetypes—which function as classes the characters can equip—and “six followers, including party members who will support the protagonist’s journey”.
I’m still downloading this 24-gig heft of a demo as I write this, but players arealready reportingthey’ve got about four to five hours with it, which is downright generous—alas, they’re also reporting someperformance problemswhich I’ve got on good authority aren’t isolated.
“I have a 7950x3d and an rtx 4090 and my GPU utilisation is all over the place,” writesone playeron the game’s subreddit. “When dashing it dips down to 70%, and when standing still it will go back up to 100% with frame rates uncapped.”
Which is a shame, considering Timothy Monbleau, who’s played the game on behalf of PC Gamer last month,reckons it’s quite good: “I have a sinking feeling that Metaphor: ReFantazio is going to consume hundreds of hours of my time when it comes out in October.”
However, taking a look at theSteam reviews, the culprit could be the game automaticallyrendering at 125% resolution, though other naysayers arerejecting the fix. Optimisation woes are notoriously tricky to diagnose, though, and I imagine there’ll be patches to come.
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Still, if you can deal with bumpy pre-launch frame drops—unfortunatelynot a rarity in our current age, with games getting bigger and bigger—then there’s really no reason not to check the demo out, especially since your save should let you pick up where you left off if you buy the full game come October: “The save data you create in this demo version can be used to continue playing the full version with the same story and character status.”
Performance issues aside, such a chunky demo shows remarkable confidence—though considering Atlus has a bit of a pedigree under its belt withPersona, that’s not unwarranted. Metaphor: ReFantazio will arrive October 11.
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